Organizations are increasingly expected to anticipate disruption, mobilize resources rapidly, maintain continuity, and learn while adversity is unfolding. Yet resilience is often assessed through organizational functioning while the employee effort required to preserve that functioning remains analytically secondary. This critical review examines how adaptive capacity and crisis readiness may generate, relocate, or conceal emotional, cognitive, and relational strain. It uses a transparent, purpose-led review approach to integrate research on organizational resilience, crisis management, work design, human resource systems, employee adjustment, and occupational well-being. The evidence converges on the importance of anticipatory capability, coordinated response, supportive resources, and adaptive learning, but it conflicts in construct definition, level of analysis, temporal framing, and the treatment of employee endurance as either a resource or an outcome. The review therefore distinguishes resilience produced through matched resources and legitimate authority from resilience sustained through intensified demands, boundary erosion, invisible coordination, and deferred recovery. Its original contribution is the Resilience-Burden Redistribution Framework, which organizes how continuity demands may move strain across employees, teams, managers, households, and organizational boundaries. The framework is a conceptual synthesis rather than a validated causal model. Implications concern demand-resource accounting, authority-responsibility alignment, consequential employee voice, recovery protection, and monitoring of delayed or displaced costs. The review remains bounded by heterogeneous measures, context-specific crisis evidence, limited longitudinal and multilevel designs, and uncertain transferability across sectors and institutional environments. Empirical testing is required before the proposed relationships can support generalized organizational prescriptions.
